In the services-oriented future, the most lucrative opportunities might not be in providing actual services, which could become commodities, but in being the collection point for data and metadata about services, O'Reilly continued. "The trick is to control the name space or the registry," he said. "Ownership of data will become the new lock-in."

Sure you can create plenty of nearly worthless SemanticEstate. For example, I pretty much own the names "Synaesmedia" and "Nooranch" on Google. But as I invented them and no-one else cares, they really have very little exploitable value. OTOH, I believe both could be turned into kick-ass brands with the right promotion. :-)